


Where the Heart Can Rest

by athenasdragon



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Holiday Fic Exchange, Holidays, Homesickness, Midwinter, Post-Canon, Uprooted Ficathon, You Can't Go Home Again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 03:17:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9104308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenasdragon/pseuds/athenasdragon
Summary: Agnieszka thinks that she can slip back into her family for the Midwinter feast. Even if her home is the same as it was, she is not, and she is nostalgic for an innocence she can never get back. After all: you can't go home again.But maybe--just maybe--she can find a new kind of peace.Title inspired by the Henry Van Dyke poem "A Home Song". Written for the Uprooted Holiday Exchange 2016.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [YourLocalIgor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourLocalIgor/gifts).



> _I read within a poet's book_   
>  _A word that starred the page:_   
>  _"Stone walls do not a prison make,_   
>  _Nor iron bars a cage!"_
> 
>  
> 
> _Yes, that is true; and something more_  
>  _You'll find, where'er you roam,_  
>  _That marble floors and gilded walls_  
>  _Can never make a home._
> 
>  
> 
> _But every house where Love abides,_  
>  _And Friendship is a guest,_  
>  _Is surely home, and home-sweet-home:_  
>  _For there the heart can rest._  
>  \- "A Home Song" by Henry Van Dyke

If she was being honest, Agnieszka loved every holiday. Each one had something that made it special: dancing, feasting, singing, warm summer sun or crisp fresh snow. And each one was spent with the people she loved the most.

“But Midwinter is my favorite,” she told the Dragon brightly when the first candlelit tree was visible from the library window. “There’s something so beautiful about it. It’s a little spot of brightness to celebrate that we’re halfway through the dark.”

The Dragon spoke without looking up from his book. “You said that the Harvest was your favorite. I seem to recall you waxing poetic about dancing in summer’s last light.”

“I probably did.”

Powerless to dampen her mood, the Dragon muttered and burrowed deeper into his chair. His perpetually feverish skin protected him from the chill, but he still made a show of tugging his coat close around him and glaring at the open window by the worktable.

Agnieszka laughed and reached out to gather a handful of falling snow. She used one of the Dragon’s cantrips to draw a fine silver net between her fingers so that the white powder collected fluffy and light. She scattered her small bounty on the table and reached out once more.

“You know, last Midwinter was the first I ever spent away from my family. I used _lirintalem_ to make myself cake and porridge and peas; I ate them down in the kitchen alone, aching with homesickness.”

The Dragon’s shoulders stiffened. “All the more reason you shouldn’t want me at your family’s supper. Nor would your family.”

“But,” Agnieszka continued, slowly building her heap of snow on the table, “I spent all summer at my cottage, and I was able to see my family whenever I wanted. You’ve been back only a few months. Perhaps I want both.”

“The world rarely works like that.”

“You mean you don’t like the idea of it. You don’t like the idea of loud, messy people and a situation you can’t control. You want me to stay here and eat a quiet supper in the kitchen with you. Protest if you want, but you want me here, not at my cottage or with my family. I know it.”

The Dragon spluttered and fell silent. Still smiling knowingly, Agnieszka released the net from her fingers with a flick of her wrist and set about scooping the snow into a pile. She glanced out the window occasionally, as though taking note of what she saw there, but the Dragon could not have noticed this because he had steadfastly returned his gaze to his book.

Cones began to take shape in the snow. They glittered in the wavering light of a candle which rested in the windowsill—unnecessary, thanks to the lamps which glowed with fireless magic, but important for the season, according to Agnieszka. She leaned close and whispered spells of growth until the smooth lumps shook off a layer of snow to reveal icy pine boughs.

Next came the houses of her village, low shapes with humped roofs which she textured like thatching by pressing her fingernail into the snow. Here was her own cottage, and here Jerzy’s down the lane, and here the large square, with Danka’s two-story house and a ring of others. Details formed more and more quickly as Agnieszka’s fingers flew over the scene. Finally, she pinched off tiny pinpricks of flame from the candle and pressed them to the icy evergreens she had shaped. They stayed there, clinging to the snow, flickering like miniatures of the candles which decorated trees across the valley.

She glanced up, pleased, and caught the Dragon’s eyes over the pages of his book. He flushed and snapped it shut. “Let’s see, then.”

Agnieszka stood back and watched him examine her work. He prodded a little at one of the trees, but jerked his finger back at the sting of the flame. “Interesting. Did you make these footprints?”

Upon further examination, there were indeed footprints threading through the village. Fresh ones appeared with little puffs of snow along the streets, at the edge of the forest, outside Agnieszka’s cottage. An especially tiny pair staggered their way up a drift before sliding back down into the rutted street.

Agnieszka smiled. “No. I think it’s bound to Dvernik now.”

“You think?” The Dragon shook his head. “Your magic may be powerful, but you still have to work on direction. It’s no use if you can’t predict the outcome.”

Agnieszka pressed her hand against his back and smirked when he twitched. “The day you give me a compliment without any qualifiers is the day I give up my cottage and live full time in the Tower.” And she turned to retrieve her cloak from the back of a chair.

The Dragon turned and watched her, expression neutral. He remained silent as she tugged on her enormous boots, and even as a clump of dirt crumbled from the sole to the floor, until she had stood and reached out her arms to perform the hated transportation spell that would save her from a long, cold walk.

“It’s beautiful,” he finally blurted. “Won’t you stay?” And he looked down, apparently furious with the floor between his feet.

Laughing, Agnieszka pulled him into her arms, where he stayed rigid with embarrassment for several seconds before mechanically putting his hands on her back. “Nice try, but I’m going home to be with my family. You’re still welcome to come. And if you want, I’ll come stay the night afterwards.” She pressed a quick kiss to his cheek and he sighed.

“Do what you will. I’ll be here.”

She smoothed her hand once over his back, feeling the warmth of him even through his shirt and his jerkin, and pulled away. “You’re sure? How many years have you lived here without celebrating Midwinter down in the Valley?”

The Dragon scowled. “Go already. At least I’ll have some peace and quiet.”

* * *

 

Yes, holidays were wonderful, Agnieszka thought, cramped into the corner of the largest room in her family’s cottage. Everything was golden and hazy with the light from the fire and the steam from the enormous pot which bubbled over it. Her brother’s youngest child clung to her skirts, mesmerized as Agnieszka let dried peas stream through her fingers and into a bowl, where they landed plump and fresh and hot. “ _Lirintalem_ ,” she whispered to the peas and the child, and the girl’s round lips mouthed the unfamiliar word. The sound held no magic. Still, she tottered away, squealing the exciting new sound to any adult she thought might be listening.

Agnieszka stood and placed the bowl of peas on the table, where the feast was growing fast. She had also fashioned some shriveled potatoes into a bed of spring carrots, which gleamed in some kind of sticky sour-sweet glaze. Her mother had prepared dozens of tiny cakes studded with raisins and cloves, soaked in honey, and a rich porridge steamed over the fire. Wensa had come after all, bearing her usual roasted chestnuts and sweet dried plums, and even a generous portion of beef, which had been hard to come by since the blight on the cattle.

Everything smelled like heaven. It was warm and crowded: all of Agnieszka’s brothers, her parents, Wensa and her daughters (even Kasia, who had made the long journey home from Kralia to Dvernik), and a handful of young children of undetermined belonging. Nothing had changed. Through the battles, the sickness, the long time spent apart, Agnieszka’s family and her home were just the same.

Still, all was not as it had been. Agnieszka wished more than anything that she could sink back into the life she once had. Her mother seemed determined that this should be the case: she scolded her daughter for her stained dress just as she always did, even tugging lightly on one of her braids to illustrate how unkempt it was. Yet everyone looked at her differently now. Respect, apprehension: both present, in varying amounts, in the gazes of her family.

Agnieszka knew that this was not without reason. She had been gone nearly a year, after all, and had come back with powerful magic—never mind that it had always lurked beneath her skin. She had gone into the Wood and returned singed but strong, supported in the arms of their distant Lord, and then she had danced with him at the Harvest when few else dared even look him in the eye. She had seen things—things that could never be unseen, either for their beauty or their terror—and she had done things that could never be undone. Her magic had mingled with that of the most powerful wizards in Polnya. She was still Agnieszka of Dvernik, but that name now held power, written as it was in the great ledger in the palace.

Firelight gleamed off Kasia’s arm as she reached out to Agnieszka, pulling her from her thoughts. “Nieshka. It’s all right. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same.”

Agnieszka stepped back to sit next to her friend, leaning her head against Kasia’s wood-warm shoulder. “I know,” she murmured, her voice low beneath the clamor around them. “But I thought it would be.”

“You’re a different person now, but you’re still little Nieshka. Look how they all love you.”

Sure enough, the two girls were the object of more than a few soft, fond looks. An outsider wouldn’t have thought them out of place in the scene: both wore soft, homespun dresses, their hair in simple braids. Nothing about them suggested either warrior or witch, besides the faint rigidness beneath Kasia’s posture.

“I spent so long wishing I was sitting right here. So many nights in the Tower, looking out over the Valley. But it will never be quite the same—or I won’t,” Agnieszka corrected herself. “It will never be the way it was before.”

“No,” Kasia agreed. “It won’t. But if we can look past that, it can be its own kind of good.”

Agnieszka knew she was right, but she couldn’t help the nostalgic sadness that settled heavy on her shoulders. Her heart seemed slow. Everything was warm and soft and losing focus, the air thickening like honey left out in the cold.

The door creaked open and in tramped her father, using an armload of firewood to cheerfully push people out of the way. There was a glimpse of crisp snow and the stark outlines of trees, then the door shut once more.

With a quick apologetic glance at Kasia, who appeared understanding, Agnieszka stood and began pushing through the small mob of people towards the door. She was barefoot in the warm room, but her boots were nowhere to be found, so she slipped out the door without them and stepped into the night.

The cold pinched her face, her hands, her feet, even her chest when she took her first huge breath, and the sensation was welcome. The thin, clear air let her breathe freely. Her too-warm feet sank into the snow and she pulled them free to take a step, and another, and then she was running, barely breaking the thin crust of ice that had formed at dusk.

She flew in the dark towards nowhere at all. First her footsteps took her in the direction of the Wood, where the dense growth had allowed only a scattering of snow to fall around her cottage, but she had no intention of running seven miles barefoot in the snow, so she turned instead towards the Spindle. It had frozen and filled with snow, leaving only a faint trough to indicate the banks.

Agnieszka’s feet went cold, then hot and prickly, then numb altogether as she ran. Her skirts flapped behind her as they grew heavy and wet. There was no point to this, she knew. There was nowhere she could run that would erase the past year. But she was _alive_. Blood ran hot beneath her skin, free from the spark of magic, and each breath seared and steamed.

When she reached the shallow depression that marked the Spindle, she stopped, and cold and exhaustion hit her like a cart. She turned to look behind her and saw her footprints, uneven and tinged with pink, stretching back towards the glimmering lights of Dvernik. She looked down and saw that the skin of her feet had cracked in the cold, and her toes were tinged with blue.

“Of all the ridiculous,” Agnieszka began, shivering and wrapping her arms around herself, when suddenly there was a crunch of snow behind her and she was lifted off her feet.

“Stop struggling, you foolish creature,” commanded a familiar voice, and Agnieszka stopped trying to kick the shins of her captor. The Dragon shifted her so that he carried her in both arms and could glare at her properly. “What explanation can you possibly have for running barefoot in the snow until your feet bleed?

Agnieszka offered no answer, both because she had none and because she had clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. The Dragon merely scowled and pulled her close into the heat of his torso. He began murmuring a spell of warmth that trickled into her veins, flooding sensation back into her fingers and toes with a flash of pain.

The Dragon’s even stride carried them back towards Dvernik. When Agnieszka’s jaw finally relaxed enough for her to speak, she huffed out a breath and asked, “How did you find me?”

“Your model of Dvernik that you bound to the village. I saw your footprints. Who else would be out barefoot?”

Agnieszka peered at her feet, which were becoming flushed with color once more. She caught at the strings of the Dragon’s warming spell and wove them into her own magic as she whispered “ _Vanastalem_ ”: doe hide boots wrapped around her feet, her skirts thickened with a half dozen petticoats, and a cloak tangled with the Dragon’s arms so that he had to set her down on her own feet again and extricate himself.

Pleased to find that her frozen legs supported her weight, Agnieszka stretched and turned to face the Dragon. “So you came to find me?”

“Well, I was hardly going to let you freeze to death,” the Dragon said roughly.

“I wasn’t going to freeze to death.”

“Hmm,” the Dragon simply said, and cast Agnieszka a doubtful look. There was worry there, too, but buried under a great many layers of annoyance. “What, may I ask, was your intention?”

Agnieszka turned towards Dvernik and the Dragon followed her. After a few seconds of silence, she sighed. “I thought that Midwinter would be just as it was when I was a child. But—but I am no longer a child. I’ve changed so much and it will never be the same again.”

A hand, hot even through her clothing, came to rest on her shoulder. Agnieszka slowed her steps as she neared the outskirts of her town. Tears she had not felt gathering spilled over and ran down her face to drip from her chin.

“That is the danger of—of connections,” the Dragon said carefully. “Especially for people like us.”

Something unidentifiable flared in Agnieszka’s chest. “This is why you wanted me to stay in the Tower.”

A beat of silence.

“Sarkan?”

The Dragon sighed. “That and more selfish reasons, I must admit.”

Further conversation was cut short when Kasia appeared, her expression worried. Her wood-solid legs cut deep troughs through the snow. “Agnieszka, where have you been? I saw your footprints—My Lord—” She barely paused long enough to dip her head at the Dragon. “—and I had no idea where you were, I didn’t want to worry your family—”

Agnieszka swiped at her tears with a sleeve and forced a laugh. “I was being ridiculous. It’s like you said, this is its own kind of good. And Sarkan is coming to dinner,” she added.

The Dragon scowled halfheartedly. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

* * *

 

No one noticed if Agnieszka’s laughter was a little forced at first. Everyone crowded around the table was much more fascinated with the fact that their Lord had deigned to join a woodcutter’s family for their Midwinter feast, and with the glances he kept sending towards their favorite Witch of the Wood. By Midwinter, everyone knew that Agnieszka spent plenty of nights in the Tower, and even that the Dragon occasionally disappeared into the Wood for a time, but the novelty never seemed to wear off.

Agnieszka, for her part, was happily crammed between Kasia and the Dragon. There was plenty of food to fill her belly, and the warmth was not so unpleasant after her freezing run to the Spindle.

“Lirintalem!” chirped her niece at the peas being offered, and Agnieszka smiled at her across the table.

Conversation stumbled and halted until someone asked about Kralia.

“It’s a city all in the warmest colors,” Kasia explained. “Like there’s sunlight baked into the stones.”

“And the castle towers over the whole of it,” added Agnieszka.

Questions began to trickle out and the conversation broke into several, everyone happy to chatter with those closest to them as they refilled their plates. Even the Dragon was drawn out with a question about the palace library.

It was as she was describing the nobility’s gardens to her brother’s wife that Agnieszka first noticed a light feeling in her chest that had nothing to do with the hot wine.

_Its own kind of good._

She looked around. Topics of conversation ranged from the royal family to the array of crops to be planted in the coming spring. The food was disappearing slowly, as was the wine, and bursts of laughter spread down the table.

_Its own kind of good._

No, things were not the same, nor would they be. But things were good. They were alive, and that was plenty, but more than that they had food and a roof over their heads and enough laughter to go around.

“Why are you making that face?” the Dragon asked suspiciously.

Agnieszka laughed. “I’m smiling. I’m happy.”

Kasia’s hand gripped hers beneath the table and she squeezed back. She would be leaving to go back to Kralia in mere days. But she was here now, and they had years and decades still in their friendship.

And the Dragon’s scowl had dropped, replaced with cautious enthusiasm as he described the kinds of books one might find on the king’s shelves.

And her whole family was there, safe and happy and well-fed.

And she was alive.

_Its own kind of good._

And so would be each Midwinter after, however bittersweet the passing of the years might make them.

Agnieszka smiled once more at the thought. “You know,” she told the Dragon, leaning unabashedly into his side, “these ‘connections’ aren’t so bad. You might try one of your own sometime.”

Though he shrugged her away, ears reddening, his hand found her wrist beneath the table, his thumb stroking over her skin. Amusement flickered in his dark eyes. “I’ll consider it.”

“Happy Midwinter.”

“Happy Midwinter!” echoed the table, each person raising their glass to toast their own little light in the darkness.


End file.
